County Community School will move to Terra Linda

A school for troubled teenagers from throughout Marin will move to the campus of the county education office in Terra Linda later this year after two decades in Santa Venetia, officials said this week.

Marin County Community School serves some 40 middle and high students who have had truancy, discipline and legal problems, including those who have been expelled from traditional schools. It has operated on the Blessed Sacrament Church property at 160 North San Pedro Road since the early 1990s but will lose its lease in June.

The school will re-locate to the Marin County of Office of Education campus at 1111 Las Gallinas Ave. in Terra Linda, county schools Superintendent Mary Jane Burke said.

"We will be looking forward to serving the students here and to being excellent neighbors," she said.

The county schools office created the community school in 1982 and has operated it in several locations, among them the former Oliver Hartzell Elementary site in Terra Linda and a Novato Unified School District site in Novato's Hamilton neighborhood.

Phoenix Academy, a separate school serving fewer than a dozen students with substance abuse problems, will also re-locate to the Terra Linda site.

County education officials will attend a meeting of the North San Rafael Coalition of Residents later this month to explain the school to neighbors.

"We simply don't have the first scrap of information on this," said Carolyn Lenert, chair of the coalition and president of the Santa Margarita Neighborhood Association. "Part of our job is to keep people up to speed on what is going on in their neighborhood."

County education officials said neighbors have little to fear about Community School. They said students are closely supervised in small groups and escorted to and from public bus stops, if necessary. They are required to remain on campus during lunch.

"We've been in that community (Santa Venetia) for 20-plus years and we have not had any significant issues or conflicts," said county schools Assistant Superintendent Luke McCann.

Eduardo Silva, a 27-year-old former Community School student, said neighbors would likely welcome the school after learning more about it.

Silva, a Sonoma State University graduate working in sales for a technology company, said Community School helped turn his life around after he was expelled from Terra Linda High School at age 15. He spent a year and-a-half at Community School, where he received counseling, mentoring and one-on-one instruction.

"The first and most important change that I felt was feeling like I had a circle of trusted advisers that I could always count on and go to in case I had questions," he said.

"There was no disruption," he added. "I actually saw more disruption with kids going through regular high school."